What has the word availed Nigeria?

Since, The Nation berthed on July 31, 2006, it has grown into a household name in news venture in the country. While some dailies have made one or two of the economy, commerce and crime their foci, the paper’s forte has always been politics. Can this be faulted? Hardly. Is not politics the determiner of who gets what, where, when and how across ages and climes? Is not politics the driver of the economy, commerce and crime in an inextricably twined web of statistical interconnectivities? What aspect of our national life in Nigeria deserves better attention than that which has enabled self-anointed/appointed stakeholders across space and time more than a fair share of the proverbial national cake?

Given such a situation as we lament daily and for the change we all crave, what have The Nation’s inimitable wordsmiths and others in some other news-based establishments not said that need to be re-said. Despite efforts of the Wole Soyinkas and now late Chinua Achebes, what has the word really offered Nigeria, a nation where milk and honey literally flow but where facts and truth have merged to affirm a minimum of 9 in every 10 of its citizens as living the unliveable and enduring the unendurable. Such horrifying litany of award-winning oddities the whole luckless lot daily endure!

In spite of its 160 million population and a gargantuan wealth, petrol and non-petrol, electricity supply has remained far less than 10 per cent required capacity, and this after the billions of dollars sunk into revamping the energy sector; importation the only significant source of supply of petroleum products in a country in which the crude was discovered over 50 years ago; infrastructural facilities, including road and rail network, entirely fallen with no appreciable efforts at reversals.

inflation at double digit and cost of staple foods infernally intolerable for a masses pummelled by a concourse of unfriendly measures by a federal admiralty that seems located in the moon.

How can we have improved electricity, roads, rail system, education and health system, reformed police/revamped and redirected security system, reduced poverty, maternal/child/infant mortality/morbidity and desirable social security payments for the elderly and the teeming unemployed Nigerians when the proverbial national cake must go in slices to placate the ever ravenous

gluttony of only the political leadership!

What better explanation for the vanishing trillions and the under-performing economy between our so-called young democracy and our malformed hearts? Should we as Nigerians not begin to question the ages of socio-economic dislocations which fertilised foundations for the emergence of the Boko Haram?

A recent comment by Joel Brinkley, former correspondent of the New York Times, was meant to be a stinker which failed to stink being too familiar. Opening his write-up on a piece he titled “Nigeria’s squandered opportunity”, Joel explained how 17 well-fortified ambulances meant to service only President Goodluck Jonathan during health and other emergences which had lain unused months in front of his office vanished into thin air just after being exposed through a newspaper photo publication.

This is, according to him, while most healthcare centres in the country’s localities cannot afford ambulances and lacking in other basic enablement; despite a daily earning of 224 million dollars from oil.

One seems needlessly worried to realise why it has always been Nigeria’s so-called leaders who see bloom/hope where doom/gloom reside; why it has always been the Minister of Finance who sees the economy performing and Gross Domestic Products (GDP) on the rise when an extreme majority can hardly manage one square (meaningful and health giving) meal on an average day!

Remember, the now jaded conclusions of researchers and economists that majority of Africans live below the poverty line as they (on average) subsist on less than one dollar (about N180) a day. Really? But, I know single mothers whose entire family of four (mother and three children) live on less than N400 a day!

Our leaders contend the health sector is comparable to any other while they, the purveyors of power, would junket to America, Germany and India each time they have headaches and other vamped emergencies. How can we believe our lives are not cheap when police bullets and trucks are sending us in scores to undeserved graves daily? Our courts have become punishment centres for ‘small mortals’ while the ‘big fishes’ who daily purloin the trillions off the common till in turns remain not just untouched but even better protected with state might!

That lone woman, Ruth Adehwe Aweto, former head of the Federal Cooperative College, Eleyele, Ibadan in Oyo State and her lieutenant, are currently in jail for inflating the college’s staff figures. Yet, those who have stolen nearly Nigeria’s entire mint still strut the streets as free men.

As the mortars maul the supposed insurgents, as the streets of Kano, Maiduguri, Sokoto and Kaduna are plastered in the blood of the enemies of the state, properly so-called, Nigeria’s political leadership should admit significant responsibility for the errors which engendered the mutation of humans to vampires. Indeed, from the famished jungles of Ibadan/Lagos, the despoiled creeks of Bayelsa/Rivers to the arid wastes of Sokoto/Kaduna, poverty, in its virulent consumptive power, has neither distinguished in colour nor spared in content. We must just admit there is a Boko Haram in waiting in one form or another across other settings in Nigeria’s much raped landscape!

Yes, only a deeper-going and genuine overhaul of the traditional conduct of governance by governments in our country can meaningfully reverse the hate-filled atmosphere that we have today. But, is government attuned to such alerts and ready to do the needful? Messages seem to have been cast overboard alongside the messengers. Baby and birth water useless? The word might not have failed Nigeria but Nigeria has failed the word. In spite of ages of robust messaging through pre-eminent messengers in news dailies, weeklies and in printed forms of higher hues, Nigeria remains in flux and fixated: governance in shambles, corruption, which defines wilful defilement of essences, the commonest quality of public officials. Nigeria’s seems to be the story of the aberrant son whose conducts consistently inverse wise counsels of his father. Our figures (both petro-trillions and sheer population) have not affected our fortune: our politics is for poverty. We lament devaluation when we cannot produce common bolt; we complain of inflation when we have not learned how not to be fed by others. We talk of hoisting a satellite when we cannot fly common balloon!

Most entities (where transparency in governance is a fixed certitude, where life counts and excesses bridled by impartial laws) have moved to the computer age and beyond when we have not entered even the machine age, a necessary start for masters of the art and science of survival in a world of competition.

Our democracy has been a demon which only consolidates our location in the worlds of the undeveloped. Lo, what has the word availed Nigeria, a country where everything is available but where nothing is on offer? How really can the word be made to work for the country? How can politics be tuned to the cause of hope for the teeming disoriented 90 per cent? How can this country be steered away from a steady and predictable slide into an Egyptian/Tunisian Hobbesian status. Now nasty and brutish with all auguries of long and consistently sought cataclysm, life has stopped just of being entirely short here. The messengers may have to recast strategies if Nigeria must work.